One of the most poignant portions of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address last Tuesday was his anecdote about Judah Samet.

Samet, who was present for the speech on his 81st birthday, survived last year’s attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that left 11 Americans tragically murdered.

But Samet’s story of bravery goes back well farther than 2018. He is a survivor of Nazi concentration camps.

Here are the remarks that President Trump made about Samet during his State of the Union speech. It is the last line, as uttered by Samet’s father, that encapsulates what the United States of America is all about.

“Tonight, we are also joined by Pittsburgh survivor Judah Samet. He arrived at the synagogue as the massacre began. But not only did Judah narrowly escape death last fall — more than seven decades ago, he narrowly survived the Nazi concentration camps. Today is Judah’s 81st birthday. Judah says he can still remember the exact moment, nearly 75 years ago, after 10 months in a concentration camp, when he and his family were put on a train, and told they were going to another camp. Suddenly the train screeched to a halt. A soldier appeared. Judah’s family braced for the worst. Then, his father cried out with joy: “It’s the Americans.“” (text via CNN)

If you have ever read Elie Wiesel’s Night, in which he chronicles the concentration camp experiences he and his father had, or watched the Why We Fight episode of the HBO series Band of Brothers, you get a small sense (but only a small sense) of the limitless brutality and utter despair of those who were forced to exist in Nazi death camps.

It is impossible for us to imagine the sheer jubilant emotion that must have emanated from those who survived to see the Americans liberate those who were held in the camps from their opporessors.

With three words, “It’s the Americans,” Judah Samet’s father not only summed up what the arrival of American troops meant to him, but he also described what the symbol of the United States of America means to the world.

America is a great nation, but it’s not because the people who live in it are created greater than other peoples of the world. The Declaration of Independence decries that assertion in its second paragraph, which does not read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that only men in the United States are created equal.” No, “all men are created equal,” is what we hold.

America is a great nation because of what its very existence means to the world. What it meant to those trying to flee religious persecution by Great Britain and what it meant to Judah Samet’s father in a Nazi concentration camp.

America is a symbol of freedom, and being unlike any nation ever before conceived, it is a symbol of great hope for much of the rest of the world. To strong nations, America leads. To weaker nations, America stands as an example.

As Americans, we should never take the line from Judah Samet’s father, “It’s the Americans,” for granted. Because still today, to citizens all around the world, the arrival of men and women bearing the stars and stripes means everything is going to be all right.